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(More customer reviews)The emphasis here's on the location rather than the notation. This Cardiff musicologist does nearly nothing to let you know what the bands and musicians in the Welsh language over the past forty years sound like, but she does plenty to explain their cultural significance. This monograph, therefore, addresses not the curious listener but the diligent scholar who wishes to place contemporary Welsh music--mainly rock and some folk and reggae-- into the frameworks for Cultural Studies pioneered by Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams. As one who confronted the borders between England and Wales himself, Williams' categories work well. Hill expands his trio of dominant culture, a residual response, and oppositional ideology with the added "alternative" category. She threads these processes into the songs of various Welsh-language artists from the mid-60s up to the end of the past century.
The early chapters emerge identical to a thesis, as Hill documents the theories upon which her study's based. While Frederic Jameson luckily earns only a single tortured citation, Doreen Massey's power-geometries and John Street's rhetorically grounded political analyses do slow the presentation to the deliberate pace of the lecturer's seminar. While these references do support her scholarship, the amount of detail given in these two-hundred pages of text proper to the background and models for her study appears better suited to a dissertation than a book meant for a slightly wider readership. Hill appends a useful chronology, but a suggested discography or annotated entries on artists for potential listeners might have been for many who close these pages a better use of the limited pagination probably allotted her by an academic publisher which charges a hefty price for this slim volume. She follows with chapters on each decade, before 1963, up to 1973 (a sign of the lag here when the first amplified band-- outside of a psych-era one-off single appeared), 1973-82, 1982-90, and the 90s. She concludes at the millennial mark, and the double-CD of "Mwng," the Super Furry Animals CD entirely in Welsh.
Pop here remains at its widest panorama. But, you must strain to hear it, rather than merely read about it. (It's a pity you cannot see much of it. A few monochrome photos must suffice. Sain's groovy DIY record sleeves, as hinted at by the Finders Keepers label reissues in their "Welsh Rare Beat" series co-curated by Furry singer Gruff Rhys could have brightened these grey columns of print considerably, given the astonishingly high cost of this slim publication. Those LPs deserve an on-line archive; no study of the label exists outside Welsh. Logically, yes: that summarizes the whole state of the Welsh pop scene regarding the wider world. Still, poetic justice and marketing research aside, perhaps the WRB culture will underwrite an English-language "crib" for us?) The survey gains energy with the arrival of folksinger-activist Dafydd Iwan. The roots of the Sain label gain attention as well as Geraint Jarman's late-70s trilogy of astonishingly realized lyrics confronting the battleground between Welsh-speaking enclaves, non-Welsh-speaking residents, and English-dominant settlers. Another testimony to the small-scale nature of Welsh music can be glimpsed when we find Jarman and his band, emerging around the same time as The Clash, became the first professional musicians able to make a living solely from their music. This chapter, to my surprise given my never having heard Jarman or known but a cursory mention of Welsh dub, intrigued me for its close readings of his gripping lyrics that Hill translates and explicates thoughtfully.
Datblygu, whose sound Hill barely notices (it resembles Mark E Smith's The Fall), has in Dave Edwards a talented tortured voice. Paeans to bleak economics, failed love, and complacent Welshness all leap off of the page as much as Jarman's verses. Hill rightly ties into Roland Barthes' definition of the "grain" of the hand, the body, the voice "the whole carnal stereophony" of Edwards' vocals. Y Tystion's duo cleverly updates Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" to lambast, like Datblygu, the "crachach"(the word's oddly absent from this volume) establishment which militant youth perceive as having commandeered the gains of the 1960s rebels such as Iwan and settled into the Caerdydd comforts of Radio Cymru and SG4. While Welsh can be broadcast into not only TV and radio but now the Net, whether or not the angrier voices of discontent can find their Cymric shout-out remains to be seen-- as with the rest of the globe given the state of our networks. I'd be intrigued to find how indie artists fare in Wales and Welsh with MySpace, filesharing, and raves, but these outlets either postdated Hill's forty-year limit or were beyond its scope. Certainly, much of her investigation reproduces lengthy lyrical excerpts in her engagingly blunt translation that express not only Iwan's "Carlo" but embittered disdain and eloquent frustration of those from post-punk, into hip-hop, and raised unwillingly under 'Magi' Thatcher.
Hill finds that by the time the Blair-era Cool Cymru manufactured the pop hits by Catatonia, Stereophonics, and Manic Street Preachers, the florescence of the Welsh scene had appeared, within Britpop, rather short-lived. It appears that the woozy decade of Oasis may have calmed the counter-assault. Welsh bands for the first time gained indie cred at least, by being found outside Wales at last. Yet, speaking for myself as a listener, the barrier of Welsh for an Anglo-American audience continued, all too appropriately, to be a challenge that trapped its makers on Ankst and Crai.
For my money, the more textured and experimental psych-pop of the Furries, and (far too little noted here) the lysergic folk of Gorky's Zygotic Mynci proved more durable. Hill glances only at Gorky's and you'd be hard pressed again-- as with nearly all of those singers and instrumentalists featured-- to have any clear idea of what these groups sound like at all. Hill fails to include any of GZM's Welsh-language lyrics and that band's move in and out of Welsh on their later CDs goes only generally mentioned in a couple of vaguely detailed paragraphs. Because her study by default stresses the lyrical expression of cultural ferment and political agitation, economic unrest and social stagnation, the tones and the tunes often get drowned out by the recitation. Hill places many of the sounds of Wales within their Anglo-American perceived patterns. However, unlike its folk tradition, Welsh rock and pop influences appear for her more distinctive as verses rather than chords.
Irony, Hill argues, displays a culture's security. If one engages in self-parody and one wags a finger of constructive criticism, then one's predicament emerges as a virtue. Hill adapts to Datblygu's predicament Terry Eagleton's "The Idea of Culture." Eagleton notes: "That someone in the process of being lowered into a snakepit cannot be ironic is a critical comment on his situation, not on irony." (155; original pp. 65-6) Edwards, Jarman, or Y Tystion can rebuke their addled countrymen and women for their plight simply because they have the leisure to consume and produce beyond the level of serpentine survival. (I wonder if being lowered into a coal mine daily produced once similar emotions?) Wales may have exhausted the "bliss" (Hill integrates Barthes' "jouissance" to smooth effect here) of the era of Tryweryn marches, back-to-nature Adfer protests, and Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg language rights campaigns by the time of the mine closures and the failure of the 1979 de-evolution vote. Flower power faded.
The post-punk and rappingly bilingual youth of the Thatcher and Blair decades, by contrast, Hill contends, had to retreat into another confrontational strategy. Less enamored of idealism, less confident of revolution, 1980s Welsh musicians and singers enter into what Simon Frith labels (in "Sound Effects," cited here) as reggae's inspiration for punk. "It opened up questions of space and time in which musical choice-- the very freedom of that choice-- stood in stark contrast to the thoughtlessness of rock 'n'roll; it implied, too, a homelessness-- this was choice as terror." (136; original p. 163) Note the delay between British and Welsh punk and rap-- this echo pattern repeats that of earlier musical genres and trends.
This spiritual descent into sonic exile and existential chaos captures well, in my opinion, the psychic state of those of us who came of age post-1960s but who inherited the potential power of that Revival radicalism that rock music often exposed us to as politically latent and culturally inherent within Celtic identity. The existence of any Irish parallels gains nearly no mention from Hill, but observations might prove useful. As I have remarked on the lack of republican or nationalist connections that remain little examined, so the musical movements and linguistic shifts that tie Ireland to Wales demand more comparison and contrast.
Ultimately, and here Geraint Jarman's pioneering confrontations with his homeland jaggedly intensify the countercultural sentiments of Dafydd Iwan for an earlier Welsh activism, the echo of religion lingers. While the chapel, the choir, and the bardic tradition of metrical intricacy find little resonance in pop music, Hill makes a surprisingly cogent case for the parallels of Rastafarianism and Welsh Nonconformity. Not on the surface or even their fundamental and obvious differences, of course, but for their mythic spells coded within a cultural patrimony. A legacy opposed to the British, the imperial, and the colonial. I cannot drift too far here, and I note that Y Tystion's later quoted with a line that accuses Henry VIII of eradicating Wales' historic faith. But, doctrinal realpolitik and...Read more›
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In the 1960s, Welsh-language popular music emerged as a vehicle for mobilizing a geographically dispersed community into political action. As the decades progressed, Welsh popular music developed beyond its acoustic folk roots, adopting the various styles of contemporary popular music, and ultimately gaining the cultural self-confidence to compete in the Anglo-American mainstream market. The resulting tensions, between Welsh and English, amateur and professional, rural and urban, the local and the international, necessitate the understanding of Welsh pop as part of a much larger cultural process. Not merely a 'Celtic' issue, the cultural struggles faced by Welsh speakers in a predominantly Anglophone environment are similar to those faced by innumerable other minority communities enduring political, social or linguistic domination. The aim of "'Blerwytirhwng?' The Place of Welsh Pop" is to explore the popular music which accompanied those struggles, to connect Wales to the larger Anglo-American popular culture, and to consider the shift in power from the dominant to the minority, the centre to the periphery.By surveying the development of Welsh-language popular music from 1945-2000, "The Place of Welsh Pop" examines those moments of crisis in Welsh cultural life which signalled a burgeoning sense of national identity, which challenged paradigms of linguistic belonging, and out of which emerged new expressions of Welshness.
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